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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23078554">Stay</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettyraven/pseuds/prettyraven'>prettyraven</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Episode: s07e05 The Angels Take Manhattan, F/M, Family, Flash Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Manhattan, Weeping Angels - Freeform</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 10:33:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,001</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23078554</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettyraven/pseuds/prettyraven</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Stay here, she wants to whisper, we can find you a new husband, find me a step-parent. </p><p>Neither of them see the blink, but they know it's coming.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Amy Pond &amp; River Song &amp; Rory Williams, Amy Pond/Rory Williams, Eleventh Doctor/River Song</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>55</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Stay</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>This is the trouble with being two people, River thinks. You want too much. You want too many things that conflict with each other, and then you end up with none of it.</p>
<p>She’s standing a little ways behind her mother, the Doctor distraught behind them. She wonders if he already knows - has seen - what Amy will do. As River, she wants the woman to go. Be with Rory, live out her human life, adopt a kid. Melody always wanted a sibling.<br/><br/>As Melody, she wants her to stay. They can be an odd family, she thinks, her and her mother and the doctor. A woman and her grown children, hundreds of years older than she is, having adventures till her memory fades and arthritis takes her knees so she can’t run so easily. They can be legends together, mother and children. Old as the universe, young as the cells that compile their bodies. She could get her mother for the rest of the woman’s life, see if the Doctor can’t find some way of prolonging it just a decade or two.</p>
<p>(young as the cells that destroy their bodies, but she doesn’t let herself think <em>that</em>.)</p>
<p>The gravestone appears, and they all know that Amy’s fate is sealed within. <br/><br/>River slips her hand into Amy's, feels the bones in them. Feels in it all the embraces they have missed out on - counts the one they did have: one, also with the face of an Angel staring down at them. She thinks that she’s never directly heard her mother say <em>I love you</em> – well, maybe once, when she was a baby, but so much time has passed since then she couldn’t be certain.</p>
<p>As River, she thinks she can discern the subtle flutter of Amy’s eyelids, the way she consciously tries not to contract the muscles too firmly, because then she’ll really be gone for good. She’s blinking without truly closing her eyes, just so she can stay a little longer in this part of their world.</p>
<p>Melody wants to form a chain, her and the Doctor linking hands to guide all them back to the TARDIS. Back to safety. Melody – River – knows how to pilot. She can be the hero, just once for her mother.</p>
<p>The Doctor will flip a switch or three, jam a lever and dematerialise them. Away from New York. Away from disappearing. <em>Stay here</em>, she wants to whisper. <em>We can find you a new husband. Find me a step-parent. </em></p>
<p>Melody knows this is just a daydream. Amy has not gone through hell – Rory has not gone through two thousand years of waiting – just for them to be separated now. Neither one of them has gone through a decade of accelerated life just to lose the other.</p>
<p>Amy recognizes her chance. It’s her best shot. They all know it and Melody can’t be selfish any longer, not when Amy has waited so long to be reunited with her husband. She’s never known her daughter, not truly.</p>
<p>Melody remembers being Mels, skittering wildly through their sleepy suburban teenage years, letting her <strike>friends</strike> parents bail her out with fond exasperation, just to get the sense of having her parents guide her. They parented her before they even knew she would exist, and she holds onto that now. Soon, it’ll be all she has left of either parent. Soon, all she’ll have is a grieving Doctor who will drop her off and they will go their separate ways.</p>
<p>(Melody wishes the Doctor would let her stay, if only so he could share more stories with her of what her parents were like. River knows this to be even less likely than Amy not blinking.)</p>
<p>She remembers trying to toe the line to keep them close, and now it doesn’t matter how closely she obeys human convention, she was always bound to lose them.</p>
<p>Melody wishes for more time. River reminds them both that it’s not going to happen, that their time with Amy has dwindled to how much longer Amy can hold out from blinking – a real one, a genuine sweep of eyelid to eyelid, blotting out light and daughter and son-in-law and the universe.</p>
<p>Melody hears Amy choke on her daughter’s given name, not the poetic almost-rhyme that her child gave herself. River is not surprised that her mother’s main thought is <em>look after the Doctor</em>. She has already spent years doing it.</p>
<p><em>Be good,</em> is all Amy can tell her to do. As every mother might tell her teenaged daughter, but River sometimes has trouble remembering how old she is. Remembers how her background ensures she might falter on what is <em>good</em>, but if she’s looking after the Doctor maybe it balances out.</p>
<p><em>Be good,</em> as though Amy is simply popping out for a few hours. <em>Look after the place, don’t burn anything down. </em></p>
<p>River has been burning things down since before Amy was around to know.</p>
<p>She kisses her mother’s hand. It’s all she can do to express her affection for the woman before her, forced to make an impossible decision. What Amy says is true though: it <em>should</em> be Amy and Rory, together. They were together long before their daughter – after her too, and this counts in its own way.</p>
<p>Their time has run down long ago, and they stand suspended in this little bubble. It’s just a matter of waiting.</p>
<p>Neither one of them sees the blink. They know it’s happening anyway.</p>
<p>And later: the gravestone is rewritten. River reads her mother’s details, impersonal, a woman with her husband’s name, full of formality. Melody weeps a little inside for the loss of a mother; River mourns the loss of her identity.</p>
<p>(this world was not designed for kindness, the sort which would keep a family together, husband and wife, daughter and in-law. they make the best of it as long as they can, and they’re all used to running anyway.</p>
<p>It’s what they do best, run, and they do ‘til they run out of time.)</p>
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